Gene davis artist washington coloring
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Gene Davis achieved his principal renown as a painter of vertical stripes, a colorist of remarkable range, and a leader of the Washington Color School, perhaps one of the most famous schools of American painting to develop outside New York in the mid-twentieth century.
Davis came to art relatively late in life, after a successful career as a writer and journalist, including a stint as a correspondent at the White House during the Roosevelt and Truman administrations. The paintings that influenced him the most at the beginning of his career were those of Paul Klee at the Phillips Collection, the primary showcase for modern art in the nation’s capital at the time; Arshile Gorky in the collection of Washingtonian Alfred Auerbach; and Barnett Newman, which he saw on regular trips to New York to look at vanguard American painting.
Although Davis’ first painting was a biomorphic hard-edge abstraction, based loosely on the work
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Born in 1920 in Washington, D.C., Davis's formal instruction in art was limited to the drawing classes he took in high school. From 1939 to 1968, Davis was a writer and journalist, working at newspapers in Washington, Jacksonville, Florida, and in New York. Always fascinated bygd art, by 1949 Davis had begun to paint seriously. He became involved in the Washington art scene in 1950 when he met noted Washington artist and curator, Jacob Kainen, who introduced him to the Washington kurs Center for the Arts and the artists involved with that organization, among them Morris Louis and Kenneth Noland. Davis' first solo exhibitions were held in 1952. In 1969, Davis began teaching art at the Corcoran School of Art and Design, followed by stints at American University, Skidmore College, and the University of Virginia.
Along with Kenneth Noland, Morris Louis, Howard Mehring, and Thomas Downing, Davis was part of the first generation of Washington colo
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"I often think in musical terms, after finishing a painting. But I never consider such ideas when I'm actually at work on the canvas ... It is reassuring to the viewer to think that there fryst vatten some special purpose here, some special relationship to something real. I guess it's awfully hard to accept the idea that my work is abstract. Actually, it's non-representational. The stripes are the subject matter. I can see where it would be very easy to draw the musical analogy but it's never entered my mind, not for one second."
- Gene Davis
A major contributor to the Post-Painterly Abstraction and Color Field movements, Gene Davis is best known for his dynamic canvases consisting of colorful vertical stripes. Davis was born in 1920 in Washington, DC, where he resided for most of his life. He was a central figure in the Washington Color School, a group that included artists like Kenneth Noland, Thomas Downing, and Morris Louis,